A different perspective on Mandela

Apartheid may have been wrong and stupid but hey, now comparisons can be
made, and the people themselves are examining the truth behind South
Africa's problems.

.....

Sarah is an Englishwoman endowed with an incisive and razor-sharp
understanding of South Africa's recent history. Unlike so many millions
of brain-washed lemmings in the UK, she sees right through the
media-contrived smoke & mirrors, lies and myths as propounded by the
MSM.

This excellent two part article appeared on the blog of Sarah
http://sarahmaidofalbion2.blogspot.com/2008/06/mandela-legend-and-legacy.html

.....

By Sarah, Maid of Albion

It is often said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom
fighter, however, this usually means that the other man has been less
than fastidious in his choice of hero, or that the "freedom fighter" in
question was on the crowd pleasing side.

On the 27th of June, London's Hyde Park played host to a concert in
honour of Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday and as expected it received
wall to wall coverage from a star struck and worshipping media, who
continue to laud Mandela as one of the greatest, or indeed the greatest,
heroes of our time.
The beaming old man appeared on stage in one of his trademark
multi-coloured shirts and cheerily acknowledge the cheers of the adoring
crowd, most of whom have been taught to believe in his sainthood since
their first days in primary school, which, for many of them, will have
occurred around the same time their hero walked free from Robben Island.

The unquestioning belief in Mandela's universally admired saintliness
was again on display in the gushing media coverage and by the unending
line of politicians and dignitaries from presidents to Prime ministers
who queued up to genuflect before him and sing his praises. It is a
brave politician or journalist who would dare to question the godliness
of this legend and consummate showman, and hence no such questions were
raised, nor were his much vaunted "achievements" subjected to any
objective scrutiny.

No matter how many speeches are given or how many news articles are
written, it will be a long time if ever before the truth about Mandela
is told.

In fact the truth about Mandela is so hidden in mythology and
misinformation that most know nothing about him prior to Robben island,
and those who do tend to exercise a form of self censorship, designed to
bolster the myth whilst consigning uncomfortable facts into the mists of
history.

For most people all they know about Mandela, prior to his release in
1990, was that he had spent 27 years in prison and was considered by
many on the left at the time (and almost everyone now) to be a political
prisoner. However, Mandela was no Aung San Suu Kyi, he was not an
innocent, democratically elected leader, imprisoned by an authoritarian
government.

Mandela was the terrorist leader of a violent terrorist organisation,
the ANC (African National Congress) which was responsible for many
thousands of, mostly black, deaths. The ANC's blood spattered history is
frequently ignored, but reminders occasionally pop up in the most
embarrassing places, indeed as recently as this month the names of
Nelson Mandela and most of the ANC remained on the US government's
terrorist watch list along with al-Queda, Hezbollah and the Tamil
Tigers. Of course the forces of political correctness are rushing to
amend that embarrassing reminder from the past. However, Mandela's name
was not on that list by mistake, he was there because of his murderous past.

Before I am accused of calumny, it should be noted that Mandela does not
seek to hide his past, in his autobiography "the long walk to Freedom"
he casually admits "signing off" the 1983 Church Street bombing carried
out by the ANC and killing 19 innocent people whilst injuring another 200.

It is true that Mandela approved that massacre and other ANC killings
from his prison cell, and there is no evidence that he personally killed
anyone but the same could be said about Stalin or Hitler, and the
violent history of the ANC, the organisation he led is not in question.

According to the Human Rights Commission it is estimated that during the
Apartheid period some 21,000 people were killed, however both the UN
Crimes against Humanity commission and South Africa's own Truth and
Reconciliation Commission are in agreement that in those 43 years the
South African Security forces killed a total of 518 people. The rest,
(some 92%) were accounted for by Africans killing Africans, many by
means of the notorious and gruesome practice of necklacing whereby a car
tyre full of petrol is placed around a victim's neck and set alight.
This particularly cruel form of execution was frequently carried out at
the behest of the ANC with the enthusiastic support of Mandela's demonic
wife Winnie.

The brutal reappearance of the deadly necklace in recent weeks is
something I shall reluctantly focus upon later.

Given that so much blood was on the hands of his party, and, as such,
the newly appointed government, some may conclude that those who praised
Madela's mercy and forgiveness, when the Truth and Reconciliation
tribunal set up after he came to power, to look into the Apartheid
years, did not include a provision for sanctions, were being
deliberately naive.

Such nativity is not uncommon when it comes to the adoring reporting of
Nelson Madela, and neither is the great leader himself rarely shy of
playing up his image of fatherly elder statesman and multi-purpose
paragon. However, in truth, the ANC's conscious decision to reject a
policy of non-violence, such as that chosen by Gandhi, in their struggle
against the white government, had left them, and by extension, their
leader, with at least as much blood on their hands as their one time
oppressors, and this fact alone prevented them from enacting the revenge
which might otherwise have been the case.

As the first post Apartheid president of South Africa it would, be
unfair if not ludicrous to judge Mandela entirely on the basis of events
before he came to power, and in any event there is many a respected
world leader or influential statesman with a blood stained past so let
us now examine Nelson Mandela's achievements, and the events which have
occurred in South Africa in the 14 short years since he took power in
following the post Apartheid election in 1994, and the new South Africa
which he created after coming to power on a surge of worldwide optimism
and hope in 1994, when, following the end of Apartheid, he and his
followers promised a new dawn for what became termed the Rainbow Nation.

Today South Africa stands out as one of the most dangerous and crime
ridden nations on Earth which is not actively at War. In 2001, only
seven years after the end of Apartheid, whilst the city of Amsterdam in
the Netherlands with 5,6 murders per 100,000 population was declared the
"murder capitol of Europe", Johannesburg, with 61.2 murders per 100,00
population and remains the world's top murder city.

In South Africa as a whole, the murder rate is seven times that of
America, in terms of rape the rate is ten times as high and includes the
ugly phenomenon of child rape, one of the few activities in which South
Africa is now a world leader. If you don't believe me, you can read what
Oprah Winfrey has to say about it here.

All other forms of violent crime are out of control, and Johannesburg is
among the top world cities for muggings and violent assault, a fact
seldom mentioned in connection with the 2010 World Cup which is
scheduled to be hosted in South Africa.

As always with black violence the primary victims are their fellow
blacks, however, the rape, murder and violent assault of whites is a
daily event, and there is more ...

As with the Matabeleland massacres, news of which the BBC, together with
much of the world media suppressed for twenty years to protect their one
time hero, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, another secret genocide is being
ignored by the world media, the genocide of white Boer farmers,
thousands of whom have been horribly tortured to death in their homes
since the end of Apartheid. Anyone who clicks on this link should we
warned that it includes some very gruesome images as the savagery of
these attacks belie the authorities attempts to dismiss them as nothing
more than a "crime wave".

Given that it is now all but illegal in South Africa to report the race
of either victim or the perpetrator of a crime (unless the perpetrator
is white and the victim black) and as modern South Africa's official
crime statistics are notoriously massaged, it is impossible to know the
exact numbers of farm murders that have taken place. Many reliable
sources estimate the figure as close to 3,000, but even if we take the
more conservative figure of 1,600 quoted in the politically correct
South African press (but not quoted at all in ours) this is three times
the numbers killed by the South African security forces over a period of
43 years, and which the UN calls a crime against humanity.

To put this in perspective, the population of South Africa is 47
million, (13 million less than Britain despite its far greater land
mass) of which the 4.3 million whites account for 9.1%, about 1% less
than the immigrant population of Britain. Can you imagine the outcry if
1,600 (let alone 3,000) members of a minority community in Britain were
tortured to death by the native population?.

Yet when the victims are white, there is hardly a peep in the South
African press and silence from the international media. Compare this to
when a white youth is the killer, such as in the case of Johan Nel, who
shot three Africans, a story which became instant world wide news with
the predictable screams of racism and machete wielding mobs baying for
his blood.

(And they accuse us of hate?!! Don't such people nauseate themselves
with their hypocrisy?!)

Crime aside, Mandela and his ANC inherited the strongest economy in
Africa, indeed, despite economic sanctions, South Africa was still one
of the richest world nations, and indeed initially there was a brief
post Apartheid boom, resulting from the lifting of sanctions and due to
the fact that until affirmative action forced most of the whites out of
their jobs to be replaced by under qualified blacks, those who had built
South Africa were still in place.

However, any optimism was to be short lived. Now, after just 14 years of
rule by Mandela and his grim successor Mbeke, corruption is rife, the
country is beset with power cuts and the infrastructure is crumbling.

The nation's great cities like Durban and Johannesburg, which could once
rival the likes of Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco, had descended in
to decaying crime ridden slums within a decade.

And in recent months we have seen the so called Rainbow nations ultimate
humiliation, as xenophobic anti immigration violence spreads across the
country. ("xenophobic" is what the media call racism when blacks do it)
As poverty and unemployment explodes and is exacerbated by the floods of
immigrants flooding in to escape the even more advanced Africanisation
of the rest of the country, the mobs turn on those they blame for
stealing their jobs, their homes, and their women.

Thus the cycle turns, and, like watching some barbaric version of "back
to the future", on the news we see exactly the same scenes we saw on our
televisions twenty years ago, wrecked buildings, burning vehicles, mobs
brandishing machetes, axes and knives hacking at everything and everyone
which comes within their reach. Most horrific of all, we see the return
of that most savage symbol of African brutality, the necklace where, to
the cheers of a blood thirsty crowd, some poor trembling soul, with a
tire around his neck, is dragged from his home and set alight, exactly
as all those other poor souls were set alight throughout the Apartheid
years, when we were told it was all the evil white man's fault.

As nothing else the return of the necklace exposes the failure of
Mandela's revolution, and those who fought for him should weep.

Under Apartheid, blacks and whites went to separate hospitals but they
received world class health care, whatever their colour, now the
facilities are collapsing or non-existent. Black children went to
different schools than white children, but they received an education,
something which is now a privileged luxury. When they grew up, their
bosses may have been white, but they had jobs and a living wage, as the
recent violence shows us, such security is but a memory for most South
Africans.

Eighteen years after Nelson and Winnie made their historic walk towards
the cameras, and 14 years, since Mandela assumed power on a tide of
optimism, a once proud South Africa slides like a crumbling, crime
ridden, wreck towards a precipice created though greed, corruption and
incompetence.

For all his gleaming smiles, grandfatherly hand gestures, and folksy
sound bites, when the crowd cheered the retired terrorist in
the gaudy shirt, they would have done best not to focus too closely upon
his much admired legacy, as they might just find that the Xhosan Emperor
has no clothes. For Nelson Mandela's lasting achievement is that, in the
face of a world wishing him well, he, and the party he leads, have shown
the world that, for all its flaws, Apartheid was a more benign system
than what replaced it, and that the average South African was
immeasurably better off under the hated white rule than they are under
the alternative which black rule has created.

That is quite an achievement, even for a living legend.